Thursday, May 10, 2012

Adventurer Conquerer King At Modern Myths in Northampton, MA

Starting on May 15th, I will be Game Mastering at Modern Myths at 34 Bridge St, Northampton on the 1st and 3rd Tuesday of the month from 7PM until 10 PM. The Mythos Room is in an upstairs space in the same building as the Modern Myths store but can't be reached through the store itself. The door to the room is on the right hand side of the building. The game will be a drop in/ drop out style where players can come as often as they like.

The campaign will include the more usual sorts of monsters and foes that don't make an appearance in my home campaign such as orcs, goblins, ogres and the like. There will also be the occasional surprising critter to keep everyone on their toes. There will be a mix of dungeon and wilderness exploration and urban hijinks. Playable races will include humans, elves and dwarves. There are a few other human offshoots that are part of a current play test for the publisher that you may be interested in trying out. There are a wide variety of character classes available to play. To give you an idea of just how much variety I will list them here. Cleric, Fighter, Mage, Thief, assassin, Explorer, Paladin, Bladedancer (a female cleric that uses swords as her only weapon), Dwarven Vaultguard (dwarven fighter type), Elven Spellsword (elven fighter priest), Dwarven Craft Priest (dwarven smith and cleric), Dwarven Fury (dwarven barbarian that wears no armor and has special abilities that are activated with magic tattoos), Dwarven Machinist (builds fantasy steampunk automatons), Warlock (sort of a dark wizard with some nasty spell choices), Witch, Shaman (proficiencies and spells are similar to a druid), Barbarian, Zaharan Ruinguard (human of ancient stock that also has some magic abilities), Nobiris Wonderworker (human of ancient noble stock that is a cleric/wizard), Mystic (kind of like the Bene Gesserit from Dune). There are also rules to create new character classes offering potential for even more options.

The Adventurer Conquerer King System was published through a successful Kickstarter Campaign by the start up company Autarch. http://www.autarch.co The underlying basis for ACKS is the Basic/Expert box sets published by TSR in 1981 and edited by Tom Moldvay and Dave "Zeb" Cook. The system has been "modernized" by making Armor Class ascending, a very smooth proficiency system and most everything is a D20 roll high mechanism. The magic system is similar to old D&D but instead of memorizing spells each day, a character can cast a certain number of spells from their repertoire of spells (which is limited). Fighters have a cool cleaving ability allowing high level characters to kill as many mooks as the player has levels in a single round. Character creation is simple and fast. Task resolution is quick and easy to learn. Various tools for game masters have been created to make city adventuring more consistent and easy to adjudicate. There are also rules for arbitrage trading, managing strongholds securing domains and hiring mercenaries that are far easier to handle than many of the older editions of D&D. I've been using them in my AD&D campaign and like them so far. I played three sessions with the designers of the game at a convention recently with low, middle and high level characters. It was about as smooth a set of games as I've ever played. I'm very impressed by what they have done.